I remember really enjoying This Mortal Coil when I read it a few years ago, I kept meaning to pick up the next book, but life happened, and I spent a few years not reading at all. Now that I'm back in a reading a phase, I want to catch up on the book series' I've started but never finished.
This Cruel Design starts off immediately after the first book left off, and starts with a bang. The first 25% is all action, plans changing, meeting new characters, new objectives. I liked it, it was interesting. Until we hit about the 30% mark, it slowed down a lot in my opinion. The character's objective was to do this one task (don't want to mention it in case someone thinks it's a spoiler), but I felt like it kept getting delayed because other things started happening.
Usually you would think this would be propelling the story forward because there's so much action, but for me, it felt like it slowed it right down to snail's pace because the characters weren't able to complete their original goal. So over the whole book, they keep trying to do this one thing, but other things keep getting in the way of that.
It made the pacing feel real slow, and I actually got a bit bored, I was worried I was going to DNF it at one stage, but I managed to push through. I think this happened because the whole book was only set over a period of a few days or a week, and I usually really dis-like it when the timeframe is so short like that. It's never enough time to feel satisfied with the events that take place in the story, in my opinion.
The pacing felt slow until 80% in, then all of a sudden everything ramped up and SO much happened in that last 20%. It was crazy. If only it had all happened at the 50% mark. I remember thinking this about This Mortal Coil too, that a lot happened in the last section of the story and had a slow middle.
This book ends on a freaking cliffhanger. And it is such a great cliffhanger. So great in fact that I'm really glad that the last book has already been published because I am definitely starting that book immediately. I can't think of anything else right now except needing to know what happens next. I need to know. There's no way I'm going to be able to read and focus on another book!
I've rated This Cruel Design 3 stars however as the middle of this book was really dull for me, and to be honest, a few other things frustrated me. One was how naive Cat was, and also how good she was. You know how some characters are just really frustrating in a story because they act all high and mighty and must always do what's right and refuse to accept anything other than that outcome? I felt like that was what Cat did. It was frustrating because she never listened to anyone else and never tried to see any other people's point of views. She also just seemed really… slow? I felt like I was connecting the dots way faster than she was and wasn't really surprised by quite a few reveals. But perhaps that just means the red herrings in the book were far too obvious.
I also found it frustrating that a key point of the conflict in this story was a lack of communication and honesty. Cole feels like he's been relegated to a character that's just there in this story to be the conflict. I never felt any real connection between him and Cat, and maybe that's because he doesn't really play a part in this story to be honest. Lack of communication is the most annoying thing when it comes to conflict. If the communication had been there, Cat wouldn't have made so many of the decisions that she did which drove the story forward, so it was frustrating that the story relied on the lack of communication to drive it forward.
The ending of This Cruel Design really did save it for me. I thought I would finish this book and never pick up the last book, but now I'm reading the last book immediately, and I have a feeling I will fly through it.
This Cruel Design was okay! The technology was still really cool. The outbreak and the virus were fascinating to read, and a lot of the discussions about it felt very relevant to the current pandemic happening in the world. So it was interesting comparing the story to real life to be honest (without the military ruling the country, that is). I definitely think it suffered second-book-syndrome, though. Fingers crossed the last book will finish the series off on a high.